


best case scenario

by verity



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alive Allison, Anchors, Angst with a Happy Ending, Depression, Falling Out of Trees, Fix-It, Friendship, Gentle Derek, M/M, Pack Building, Sweaters, Werewolf Allison Argent, Werewolf Stiles Stilinski
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-03
Updated: 2014-06-03
Packaged: 2018-01-25 00:09:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1621958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verity/pseuds/verity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The fourth time Stiles breaks the fridge, Dad is less sympathetic. “Stiles,” he says as Stiles holds the door steady for him to screw it back onto the chassis—there's new hardware involved this time, and not a little duct tape— “I thought this werewolf thing was going to help.”</p><p>“Yeah, with the dementia,” Stiles says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Español available: [best case scenario [traducción]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3298964) by [athenasword](https://archiveofourown.org/users/athenasword/pseuds/athenasword)



> inspired by: Daunt's sweater!Derek doodle (link forthcoming)
> 
> greatest thanks to: Ashe, Scout, Dira, languisity, Amber, Luz, and pinetreekate!
> 
> content notes: depression, self-destructive behavior, underage drinking

The bite is barely a sting. There's Scott's mouth on his neck, hot breath, then blood trickling warm over his clammy skin. The pillowcase gets wet behind his neck. Stiles closes his eyes.

It's like falling asleep.

—

When he wakes up, Lydia's next to him on the bed and sleeping for real, curled up on her side and drooling on the pillow. Stiles pokes her, tentative; she jolts, shuddering into awareness to press a hand to her side. "Fuck, not so _hard_."

Stiles tucks his hands up into his armpits, as far back as they can go. "I'm sorry," he says, inching backward until he's teetering on the edge of the mattress. "I didn't—"

"Well," Lydia says drily, "You're definitely not dead."

"I guess not," Stiles says.

Everything is really loud. He can hear Lydia's heartbeat like a drum in his ears, slowing from adrenaline-fueled crescendo, and muffled voices downstairs, carpet scuffing beneath someone's feet on the stairs. His bed smells like sweat and blood. "How is Allison?" he says.

There are dark circles under her eyes that Lydia hasn't bothered to paint away, but her smile is broad and genuine. "She broke her headboard getting out of bed."

"Good," Stiles says. He can already feel the familiar pool of dread and anxiety swirling behind his breastbone, but there's joy there, too. Considering how fucked up everything is, this is the best case scenario. Everybody has super powers. They're going to be, like, the werewolf Avengers, if Scott still has the eyepatch from their pirate Halloween.

Lydia pushes up on her elbows. "I can hear you better now. I hear your heartbeat all the time."

"What's it like?" Stiles says, cautiously stretching. He likes his headboard.

She makes a face. "It's giving me a headache."

—

Downstairs, Scott wraps his arms around Stiles, squeezes him tight, one hand wrapped around to the back of Stiles's neck, thumb pressing into the vulnerable curve. Stiles's whole body thrums with the force of Scott's approval. His alpha. "Dude," Scott says, stepping back. "You're okay. You made it."

"You did it," Stiles says. "I—thanks."

Scott smiles at him. Like Lydia, he looks tired, worn; relieved. He's bitten three people in the past two days. First Allison, then the nogitsune wearing Stiles's skin, and, finally, Stiles. "Of course."

Stiles bruises his dad's ribs when they hug. "You don't know your own strength, kid," Dad says gently. "It's okay."

Then Stiles yanks the door off the freezer when he goes for the frozen peas. "I'm sorry, shit, I didn't mean to—" He tries to draw back the claws that popped out with the shock, digging into the insulation on the door, but they're stuck. "Everything's _weird_."

"It'll get better," Scott says as he works Stiles's claws loose. "It was pretty touch and go for the first few days for me, remember?"

Dad sighs, then grimaces, pressing the peas to his side. "I made it through the summer you were 12. We'll survive."

—

The cover story is bacterial meningitis. Melissa sits down with him, goes over the symptoms. "Recovery takes a while, and even after that, a lot of people still have trouble with balance, memory, a couple other things," she says. "I'll take care of the paperwork. You're going to rest at home for a week or two, get caught up on your classwork, then you can go back to school."

Stiles feels fine. He's itching to leave the house now, actually, restless, knee jiggling as he looks over the paper Melissa gives him. "People are really going to believe that?"

Melissa shrugs. "They're still saying what happened at the hospital was a debt collection attempt gone wrong. People believe what they want to believe."

"Do they—think it was me?" Stiles says. His face must be all over the security cameras. The thing that wore his face, that—he glances at Melissa's leg, the outline of the bandage on her still-healing wound visible through her scrubs.

"No," Melissa says, then, "No one blames you," which isn't the same thing at all.

—

Everything smells weird, familiar-but-foreign. The bathroom Stiles shares with his dad used to have a vague odor of Old Spice and clip-on toilet bowl cleaner; now Stiles can smell mildew in the grout, the bottom-of-the-trash-can funk, his dad's aftershave. He usually jerks off in the shower at night before bed, but the last one's a total boner killer. Trying to jerk off in bed goes just as poorly. Stiles used to like it rough and fast, just some spit in the palm of his right hand, but "rough" and "fast" were different settings before he had supernatural strength and speed at his disposal.

But it's okay. Stiles just needs a little time to get used to his werewolf powers and his werewolf body. This is normal.

Scott brings over Red Vines and his Wii on Day 2 of werewolfhood. The Red Vines taste weird and waxy; they end up eating them in the bathroom while they shift in the mirror. "These are, like, fucking muttonchops," Stiles says, prodding his hairy cheeks. He barely even has chest hair. "And I have a unibrow."

"You should grow a mustache," Scott says, sculpting one out of licorice for himself.

Stiles's fangs make his mouth feel too full; he has a ridiculous overbite. After a few minutes of experimentation, he settles with leaving the top set hanging out over his lower lip. He's a creature of the night, but he looks like he's playing dress up. "Grr," he says, flexing his claws. "Do I look scary?"

Scott grins. "Super intimidating, dude."

As a wolf, Stiles's eyes are blue. They don't talk about it.

—

As established during the great mono episode of 2010, Stiles is not a guy who does well on house arrest. He spends four days drowning in get-well cards, AP Earth Science work packets, and Spongebob episodes before he cracks. It's a Sunday afternoon, beautiful and breezy—how is he supposed to resist that? He's a wolf now—he should be outside, frolicking in the sunlight in a meadow or something.

He hits the mailbox backing out of the driveway.

Allison and Lydia come to visit him the next day with balloons and a plush bear with "Feel Better" in script on its belly. "No chocolate?" Stiles says as he steps aside to let them in.

Lydia says, "I hear it's bad for dogs." Allison rolls her eyes.

They sit in the living room, Stiles in his dad's recliner and the girls on couch. Aside from Scott, Stiles hasn't had anyone over just to hang out since Harley moved to Santa Cruz last year. "Um, do you want anything to drink?"

Allison smooths her skirt over her knees. "I'm good. How are you doing?"

Stiles shrugs, lets his eyes flash. "Okay," he says. "I think I'd rather have meningitis."

"It's weird," Allison agrees. "Dad is—" She looks down at her feet. "He's okay, actually, but…"

"I'm not sorry you didn't kill yourself because of _hunter principles_." Lydia crosses her arms; the big balloon she's still holding bops Allison in the head.

"Yeah, me either," Stiles says hastily. "Team… not dead."

There's an awkward pause.

Allison slumps back against the couch. "My dad is making recertify on every weapon we own."

Stiles says, "My dad took away my car keys."

—

The fourth time Stiles breaks the fridge, Dad is less sympathetic. “Stiles,” he says as Stiles holds the door steady for him to screw it back onto the chassis—there's new hardware involved this time, and not a little duct tape— “I thought this werewolf thing was going to help.”

“Yeah, with the dementia,” Stiles says.

—

Stiles is back in school the next Monday. It would be easier if he couldn't hear all the things that everyone's whispering about him, if every moment weren't so saturated with noise and light and scent. He can barely focus on what's in his textbook, let alone what his teachers are saying or what's written on the board.

"I'm taking you off the lacrosse team, Stilinski," Finstock says. "You'd be useless on the field, and I don't actually want to kill you. Congrats on not dying, by the way."

Stiles fidgets, thumbing the binding of his econ book, trying to keep his nails blunt and human. "Thanks," he says.

Finstock smiles at him. "Now, repeat after me—I'm not going to write another paper on the erotic sculpture of Pompeii when Coach asks me to write about NAFTA."

—

One week passes, then another. The full moon is approaching, but Stiles's control isn't any better.

"You need an anchor," Scott says at lunch. "Something that centers you. It could be a memory, a person, an emotion—"

"Yeah, yeah, I know that," Stiles says around a mouthful of oily cafeteria lasagna. He can't help but glance toward Allison, her head bent toward Lydia's as they flip through a copy of _Vogue_.

Scott follows his gaze and says, "I know it's not that easy for you."

Cautiously, Stiles cuts into his lasagna with his spork. When Scott was out of control, Stiles taped his hands behind his back and lobbed lacrosse balls at him, shackled him to a radiator and left him a bowl of water. He doesn't understand why everyone is so nice to him, why everyone treats him like the wrong word is what will make him break.

"Maybe we could, like—" Scott hums, thoughtful. "We could meditate? We could try—"

The bell for the end of lunch period rings, cutting him off.

—

Stiles spends his first full moon in his basement, intermittently lucid, sporadically supervised as Scott darts between him and the rest of the pack in the preserve. Without an anchor, he's drifting wood on a shifting, volatile sea, helpless to resist the pull of the moon and his own internal tides. He nearly takes out the support beam Scott and Dad chained him to, comes shivering into awareness in a puddle of his own piss at dawn with the house trembling around him with the force of his fury.

Before he had supernatural strength at his disposal, Stiles did just fine on his own— skinned knees, mostly, and the occasional tipped vending machine. The bite hasn't fixed that. Instead, it's taken Stiles’s body from him, put him inside this hypersensitive, overpowered machine, and turned the world around him into a vulnerable minefield.

—

Allison decides they should train together. "I've been peeling fruit," she says, pulling a basket of fruit toward them on the counter. "If you get it in one strip, it's a perfect score. I post those on Instagram."

“I don’t think this is normal,” Stiles says when his claws sink deep into his fourth clementine, the juice running down his hands, dripping onto the floor. An apartment over, Allison's neighbor changes the channel back from _Kill Bill_ to _Bridezillas_. Allison’s apple peel is already on the counter, her phone in hand; she’s deliberating over the best angle. “You’re, like, Wolverine, and I’m—”

Allison sits down her phone and reaches out to ease the clementine free. The juice drips between them onto the floor. "You're fine," she lies. "You're going to figure this out."

—

Peter fucked off to Oregon while the Oni were getting their sword on, Cora's in South America, and Malia's a coyote. Again. It's sort of nice that there's nothing terrible on the horizon, but the gap in serial villains means that Stiles has become the focus of everyone's concern.

"This isn't my territory, so to speak," Deaton says as he clips the nails of the chihuahua between them. The chihuahua's probably sedated; he looks stoned.

Stiles folds his arms. "You were an emissary."

"You train dogs," Scott adds.

Deaton raises his eyebrows. "I do not believe discipline is the root of Stiles's difficulties."

Ten years of report cards and parent-teacher conferences would suggest otherwise, but okay. Scott says, "What do you think we should do?"

Stiles stews over it the whole way home with Scott at the wheel of the Jeep—Stiles still hasn't been cleared to drive. They sit in silence for a moment after Scott cuts the ignition in front of Stiles's house. “This is a great plan,” Stiles says finally. “Derek is going to _Eat, Pray, Anchor_ me into my wolf suit, because he’s so—”

Scott reaches out like he's going to sock Stiles in the arm, but he pulls back at the last second. “He’s the best resource we have.”

“Why can’t you do it?” Stiles shifts in his seat, getting up in Scott’s space. He feels sick to his stomach, pushed and pulled, but he can’t stop himself anymore than he can hold in his claws or his teeth. “Why won’t you?”

“I don't know the stuff Derek does,” Scott says. "He came back to help us. I trust him."

Stiles says, "Are you afraid of me?"

Scott's quiet for a moment, brow furrowed, tense; his face was wide open and slack with shock when the nogitsune shoved the katana further in and twisted. "That wasn't you."

"Well, I'm your monster now," Stiles says.

—

Stiles can't remember the last time he saw Derek—he's still around, floating on the edge of Scott's pack, but the two of them never overlap. Derek is out in the wild; Stiles is in a cone of shame in the metaphorical kennel.

Today, they're in Scott's backyard. "So, you're super qualified to teach werewolf Sunday school," Stiles says, swinging a leg over the bench of the picnic table in Scott’s backyard to straddle it. Derek’s sitting at the table, flipping through the pages of a hefty book, his body swallowed up by a gigantic dad sweater. “What are you reading, the manual?”

Derek flips the book closed so Stiles can see the jacket, where _The Infinite Jest_ stretches in blocky neon letters over a cloud. “There isn't one.”

Stiles leans forward, bracing an elbow on the table. “Are you going to break my arm? Shove me around? Is that how it works?”

“I’m not your alpha,” Derek says, turning toward him. “I’m not even your packmate. It doesn’t mean anything if I make you submit.”

“It wouldn’t be hard,” Stiles says.

Derek looks at Stiles for a moment. As an omega, he’s softer, sadder somehow, not much like the vicious alpha or defiant beta that Stiles remembers. Derek doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself without someone running after him. “Scott asked me to help you,” he says finally. “He wants you to be able to take care of yourself—he doesn’t want you to get hurt.”

Too late for that.

—

Scott has his pack, Allison has her code, Derek has his territory, Isaac has his father. "Excuse you, I don't turn into a ravening hellbeast," Lydia says, brushing topcoat on her nails. Kira shorted out some lightbulbs once. They make it look easy.

Stiles used to be the token human. The price he paid for that is still written on his body in a truncated timeline of scars; his skin won't hold whatever new wounds accrue. "You'll find someone else," Deaton says when he hands the mountain ash over. "The spark isn't so rare."

"You made it sound special," Stiles says. He tries to focus on the scents around him, astringent antiseptic over the pungent traces of animal, shit and sweat and piss. Lower, there's old blood, used syringes in the orange disposal box with the hazard sign, and the herbal haze that surrounds Deaton like fading fog. The exam table is slow to warm under his hands.

"It is," Deaton agrees. "But not unique."

Stiles watches while Deaton packs away the mountain ash, tucking the reused film canisters away into an empty shoebox that smells like kitten. There's nothing formal about it, but the moment feels like a ceremony, as certain and unforgiving as the waiting room gate that Stiles can no longer push in. The bite remade Stiles's body, but this is the changeover, the transition point. He wants to leave; he wants this to never be over.

After, he sits in the parking lot for a while, leaning against the frame of his bike. His eyes sting. It takes him an hour to pull it together enough to text Lydia.

—

"So, what was your trip to South America like?" Stiles is lying on his back on the grass in his backyard with a broken branch poking between his shoulderblades. The pine tree overhead is one he's been climbing since he was five, and he's just fallen out of it for the third time in a row. "Did you Che it up on motorcycles? Except the spiritually healing edition?"

Derek hovers over him, eyebrows slanting together like a bird formation. "I don't know how to ride a motorcycle," Derek says. "We went to Brazil."

All Stiles knows about Brazil is that it is the world's fifth largest country, has produced several models in the Victoria's Secret fashion show, and there are beaches. Mostly he knows about the beaches from Melissa's aspirational vacation screensaver. "Sounds nice," he hazards.

"Come on. Up." Derek holds out his hand.

They've been training all afternoon. Stiles climbs up the tree as high as he can go, gauging what branches are sturdy enough to support his weight. In theory, it's the same thing he's been doing for most of his life, but he can't single out the faded scent of dead wood from the leafy vitality around him, and the precision of weight distribution is complicated by the fact he grasps everything too firmly, digging his feet into his supports too hard.

The next time, Stiles nearly reaches the top before a branch breaks and he plummets. The air rushes out of his lungs when he hits the ground. Everything goes blurry for a minute. He stares at the blue sky above him while the light patches resolve into clouds.

Derek says, "You okay?"

When Stiles reaches a hand up to the sore spot behind his ear, he can feel leaves stuck to the drying blood there. "I'm done," he says, ignoring Derek's hand and shoving himself to his feet. "Seriously, I can't."

"Focus." Derek grabs his shoulder and yanks him back toward the tree. "I know you can do this if you want to."

Stiles steps forward and—oh, it feels _good_ to put his hands on Derek's chest and shove him. "I'm not _you_."

If it were that easy, Stiles wouldn't have a decade of doctor's visits and a prescription that barely works—his new body metabolizes extended-release stimulants in an hour or two. He's started hoarding his meds for tests, chem homework, final papers. School days are torture, squirming in his chair while rubber soles squeak against the tile, chalk scrapes the board, and phones vibrate in everyone's bags. That was hard enough before the volume on his senses turned up to eleven and every wrong move became a potential catastrophe.

Stiles shoves, but Derek doesn't budge. Instead, he grabs Stiles's wrists hard enough to bruise, leaves Stiles's hands splayed on his chest, dirty palms pressed to the pale wool of his sweater. "Is that what you think?" Derek says. "You think I could do better if I just tried harder?"

"I don't know," Stiles says, stumbling backward, tugging himself free. "I don't think about you."

"Right," Derek says.

—

“Don’t touch anything delicate,” Lydia says while Stiles hovers on the threshold of her living room, loaded down with books and binders. “In fact, why don’t you sit on the floor? I don’t want to risk the couch.”

“Sure,” Stiles says. Then he dumps the whole pile on the couch, because he's kind of a dick.

Stiles sits at Lydia’s feet and she cards her fingers through his hair while she pages through his pre-nogitsune case notes and the grimoires he's bought off eBay. Sometimes she smooths her thumb over the skin behind his ear, scrapes her nails across his nape; when Stiles tilts his head to bare his throat to her, she drags her fingers against the grain of the stubble on his jaw. For the first time in weeks, he feels calm, focused, the simmering beta need to surrender sated and soothed. Scott won’t force him, but Lydia will.

Afterward, she walks him out to the front door. “I can hear your heartbeat in my sleep," she says on the threshold. "It's like you're haunting me."

"I'm not _doing_ anything," Stiles says. He shuffles his feet. "You're not my anchor."

Lydia says, "Good."

—

There's an unopened bottle of Jack behind the cereal boxes in the cabinet and a half-empty liter of Smirnoff in the liquor cabinet; Dad is working a double. Stiles doesn't exactly sneak out. He texts his dad _home late, werewolf business_ , wraps the bottles in some crumpled plastic bags, and wheels his bike out of the garage under the steely gaze of Mr. Thomas across the street. The ride to the preserve is four miles one way, but Stiles has mistletoe syrup in his backpack and determination under his belt. He's done this before. He's going to get drunk and disorderly.

At night, the preserve is still creepy as shit. Stiles can see better, but that doesn't really help. As a human, the noises were hushed, the chitter of animals punctuated by bird calls and debris crunching beneath Stiles's feet—he felt like an intruder, high on a false sense of his own importance. Now he's bombarded by the soundtrack of the nocturnal party going on, hoots and screeches and bellows; when he breathes in, all he can taste is mulch. A faint buzz runs through him when he crouches to touch the forest floor—earth magic, the waning tremors of the nemeton.

Fucking magic. That's not even what got him here in the first place, just his own recklessness and stupidity. Stiles stands and wipes his hand off on his pants, then hitches up the straps of his backpack. In for a penny, in for a pound. He wants—he just doesn't want to think about it.

He starts with vodka, mixing it with the mistletoe syrup in an old Nalgene with the faded insignia of a YMCA summer camp program. The internet suggested a 1:6 ratio to start out with, but a dozen swallows in, all Stiles has is a headache. He drops his head back against the log behind him and closes his eyes. He's too wound up to doze. After a minute, he pulls his phone out of his pocket.

_how do u get werewolf wasted_

A few seconds later, his phone starts ringing. "You couldn't just text back like a normal person?" Stiles says, rubbing his forehead with his free hand.

"Where are you?" Derek says.

Stiles's stomach twinges; he bumps the Nalgene with his knee and tips it over, sloshing most of what's left on the ground. "Fuck," he whines. "Come on, Derek, you're my only hope. I gotta—"

An owl hoots, on cue. "The preserve," Derek says after a moment. "Where in the preserve? The campgrounds?"

"You're not my dad," Stiles says.

Derek sighs. "What did you take?"

"Mistletoe," Stiles says. "It's supposed to—" He hiccups.

"Stay where you are," Derek says in his alpha voice. The line goes dead.

Stiles opens the Jack Daniels, fingers slipping on the bottle cap. Whiskey might not give him a buzz, but it still burns going down, harsh enough that his eyes water. He texts Scott next, just _ilu bro_ , because he does, he does. His phone gets all slippery in his hand after that, somehow; when he drops it on the ground, Stiles leaves it beside him and lifts his hands to scrub at his eyes. His head is pounding and his gut churns. The screen on his phone lights up when Scott texts back a rocket emoji, then _u ok tho_. Stiles doesn't text back.

Time stretches out like when he's finished the work for a standardized test and the clock still isn't up. Stiles's palms are flat on the dirt. When he tries to move his hand toward his phone, his fingers drag for a second, but they won't quite go. At least he's not trying to get away from anything. He's not afraid.

"How much did you take." Derek is shaking Stiles awake. Stiles doesn't remember falling asleep. "The mistletoe—how much? What part?"

Stiles squints at the empty container next to his backpack. "Boiled the leaves," he slurs. "Just—four or five. Not a lot."

"Okay," Derek says. His heartbeat's steady; he's so calm. "You're going to throw up now. Then I'm going to text Scott and drive you home."

"My bike," Stiles protests.

Derek helps Stiles turn on his side, away from the fallen Nalgene. "I'll get your bike."

Stiles wakes up at noon in his own bed. He doesn't even have a hangover.

—

Derek's pack always seemed to hang out together, a clique in leather jackets like something out of an S.E. Hinton novel; Scott's is almost never in the same place at the same time. Kira and Allison take to hitting the gun range together, Scott and Isaac live in the same house, and Lydia and Stiles fall in the habit of meeting up on their own, working through Stiles's old notes on the half-translated bestiary, scouring newer acquisitions for information about Lydia's powers, and meditating. Honing their focus.

Stiles gets their yoga mats out of the coat closet while Lydia draws the shades in the living room; he unrolls the mats and Lydia straightens them until they're parallel, long sides opposing each other. "We'll do sound today," she says, like she's doing him a favor. "I have a recording."

"Of course you do," Stiles says.

Lydia rolls her eyes and lowers herself into a perfect lotus position, adjusting her the drape of her skirt over her knees. Her nails are shorter now, though they've been perfectly lacquered to conceal that she's bitten them down to the quick. "It's a bell. We'll focus on our sensory perceptions, which—"

Stiles drops down across from her. "I _know_."

The tinny speakers in Lydia's phone flatten out the tone of the bell, tamping the low resonance down into a faint buzz. Outside, a door slams, a squirrel chitters, a truck rumbles past. Stiles cheats and opens his eyes, watching dust motes float over Lydia's slack face. The bell chimes again.

"I can hear you," Lydia says. "Pay attention."

—

Stiles gets locked up on for the fourth full moon in a row. Since the first time, they've made do with Derek's old loft. Derek has a new apartment somewhere, one that doesn't have floorboards stained with the blood of his packmates; Stiles doesn't know where it is.

Scott is gentle as he puts on Stiles's restraints, cast-iron cuffs and chain. Iron has some magical resistance, so it's better than stainless steel, but it's heavy as fuck and the heavy cuffs are rough against Stiles's wrists. He'll bleed and heal and bleed again by morning.

"You want me to stay with you?" Scott says. He couldn't the first time, but he came back every few hours, put cool palms to Stiles's fevered brow and held him still.

This moon, Stiles refuses, as he has the last two. "Go give the other puppies some exercise," he says. "Say hi for me."

Scott nods. "Howl if you need me."

After Scott leaves, Stiles rips off the bottom of his t-shirt, enough fabric to use for a gag. By the time the moon rises, it's already swollen in his mouth, half-soaked in his spit. Stiles tries to hold the shift in—makes it a few minutes before it comes on like a helpless gasp, washing over him and filling choked lungs. The gag tastes disgusting, and everything around him smells like fear, sweat, and pain. He cries; he cries every time. He didn't want this. He just didn't want to die.

—

"Maybe I'm an old dog who can't learn new tricks," Stiles says as he crouches to pick up the two tennis balls again. They came fresh from the tube this morning, but they're already spotted with dark patches of dirt. "Think of that?"

Derek huffs out a breath, shifts his weight on the creaking lawn chair. "Tricks _are_ for kids."

One of the tennis balls hits Stiles right in the face, and he barely manages to catch it, pressing that ball to his chest with his forearm while he strains for the one still in the air. "Comedian and werewolf occupational therapist. That must be fun to put on your resume."

"I have a B.A. in English," Derek says. "I wrote my thesis on _The Glass Menagerie_."

"How the fuck did you write a thesis on that? I couldn't do two pages." The balls arc in the air over Stiles's head for what feels like the hundredth time; he tilts his head back to watch their movement against the sky, waiting for the inevitable plunge somewhere beyond his waiting hands. If Lydia were here, she'd be adjusting the angle of his hands, probably, giving him a lecture on gravitational potential energy and air resistance. Derek acts like some kind of alchemy will occur by Stiles smacking himself in the face with an infinite supply of tennis balls or falling over and over from a great height into the dirt. They went running in the forest last week and Stiles tripped over a dozen roots. Same deal. "I can't do this."

"Stop messing around," Derek says, snatching the balls out of the air before they can land. "I didn't think you were a quitter."

Everything is too loud: the birds in the trees that wake Stiles up at sunrise, the leaves shifting on the ground with the breeze, Derek's steady heartbeat. A car passes on the street. When Derek tosses the tennis balls up again, Stiles wraps his arms around his chest and looks down before they fall. "I want to stop," Stiles says. "I need to, okay."

Just like that, Derek steps back, backs off. The tennis balls bounce and scatter around them. "Okay," he says. "See you Monday."

—

Lydia throws Allison a birthday party, heavy on the wolfsbane-infused booze and fancy birthday cake. Allison is the first in the pack to turn 18 and the vibe is celebratory: at least one of them has made it. Stiles gives her a copy of Playgirl, Scott gives her a set of ballpoint pens with _#1 WEREWOLF_ printed on them, and Lydia gives her a lingering, open-mouthed kiss.

Stiles spends most of the party playing fetch with Prada on the back porch. He's not bitter, that's the thing. When Lydia was with guys who were dicks, sure—she deserved better. But there's pretty much no one better than Allison.

"You good?" Allison says, emerging mid-party with a glass of wine in her hand and a perfect red lipstick print on her cheek. The fingers curved around her glass are clawed, which is probably more a reflection of how much she's had to drink than supernatural self-acceptance. "I don't want stuff to be weird."

Carefully, Stiles scratches Prada under her chin; Prada preens. "We're good," he says. "You and me, Lydia and me. Congrats."

" _And his heart grew one size bigger that day_ ," Lydia says from the doorway.

—

Scott, Stiles, and Isaac get paired together for a project by their Earth Science teacher, who should know better.

"Just like old times, yeah." Stiles sprawls on Scott's bed while Scott upends his backpack all over the desk; Isaac, the last upstairs, is resigned to glowering on the periphery. "Except with extra… deer."

"Our topic is reintroducing wolves to the wild," Isaac says flatly. "The deer die."

Scott claps Isaac on the back. "Reducing crop damage _and_ protecting forest growth."

They have to write a five-paragraph essay and prepare a brief presentation on their topic. Stiles already has three Wikipedia pages open on his phone. "It doesn't say anything about outside reading," he says around a mouthful of pencil. "We could knock this out in, like, a day."

"Powerpoint?" Scott minimizes the bestiary PDF on his computer to reveal the clutter of icons on his desktop. "Puppets?"

Stiles grabs a discarded jockstrap off the floor and throws it at the back of Scott's head; Scott turns and snatches it out of the air before it can make contact. "We're not doing _puppets_ ," Isaac protests.

They make puppets. The force of Scott's approval feels so good, the reassurance of his scent and presence and attention; Stiles feels embarrassed to be basking in it as he glues googly eyes and felt ears onto an assortment of loner socks. Scott makes antlers out of pipe cleaners and Isaac turns a wad of fallen leaves into an half-assed forest backdrop. This is high school, middle school, elementary school, just the latest data point on their history of book reports of science fair poster boards. Business as usual.

—

"I need you to feed my cat," Derek says at the end of their next training session.

Stiles has been building houses out of playing cards for the last hour, which is a flashback to his childhood fixation on Jenga except in reverse and more terrible. "Your what?" he says as a central support in this one bends, buckles, and the inevitable collapse begins.

"My cat," Derek says again, impatient. "Cora is in LA this weekend, and—if your dad won't mind."

Stiles bikes over on Saturday morning, Derek's keys jostling for space with his own in his pocket. Derek lives close to the center of town, above a lawyer's office; Stiles unlocks a nondescript door on the street and walks two flights up a narrow staircase before he comes to Apartment D.

Maggie the Cat—her name is engraved on her tag in Comic Sans just above the exhortation to "Call My Family!" and Derek's phone number—has three legs, FIV, and eats special grain-free wet food. She runs up to Stiles as soon as he opens the door and scents him, rubbing her nose against his jeans. Stiles can't help looking around while Maggie eats, although he's careful not to touch anything and leave his own scent as a marker. The apartment is a studio, big and sunny, with hardwood floors and large windows. There's a couple volumes of the _Lone Wolf and Cub_ manga next to the couch that smell like Kira, a pet carrier that smells like Scott, a paint-splattered sweater draped over the back of a chair that smells like mothballs.

Derek's own scent is everywhere, rich and stale. It makes Stiles itch under the skin.

—

Lydia turns, tapping mountain ash from the test tube in her hand in a neat arc onto Stiles's kitchen floor. "Test it."

With a sigh, Stiles puts down his glass of Sunny-D and steps over. The barrier burns icy-hot against his hand when he reaches forward, just like it has the last two times. "It works," he says. "You've got it down."

"It always seemed more, hmm—" Lydia toes the line of ash until it breaks. "Impressive."

Stiles shrugs. Setting a circle felt pretty magical the first time he did it, without enough ash, without time on his side. Wondrous. Under the yellow light of the fixture above them, the ash is a dirty smear on the floor.

When he bends down to pick up the brush and dustpan, Lydia snags him by the collar. "This isn't about you."

"Deaton wants you to train with him." Stiles says, teetering. He steadies himself on the tips of his fingers and the balls of his feet like he's about to launch into a sprint. "You've got a spark, you've got potential, right—I bet that's exactly what he said."

Lydia drops her hand so she's gripping him by the scruff of his neck. "The speech was more about honing my psychic power." She runs her thumbnail across his spine. "Cut it out."

Down on the floor, Stiles stares at the grout between the tiles, the ground-in dirt and the occasional air bubble. The broken ring of mountain ash in front of him shifts and settles as he exhales. He purses his lips and blows, but the ash only trembles, like one of those birthday cakes with trick candles.

—

“When did you first shift?” They're doing tree-climbing again. Stiles caught himself mid-fall this time, so he's getting his breath back while the bark of the thick branch beneath him digs into his belly.

Below him, Derek frowns. “I was two, probably. Why?”

Stiles lets his body go slack. “Did you have trouble when you got a growth spurt? Like, the thing where you keep forgetting how tall you are and banging your head on the overhead cabinets?”

"Not really." Derek folds his arms; in his ridiculous Cosby sweater, he looks like a sitcom dad, a stupidly handsome caricature of the real thing. “That's a human problem, I think.”

It's almost pleasant to hang here like this, arms and legs dangling into the breach. Stiles closes his eyes and shifts: lets his claws come out, the hair on his cheeks grow, his brown harden. “It’s been six months," he says. "This is going to get better, right? I’m pretty sure it took less time for my voice to even out.”

Derek's quiet for a moment. “I don’t know. You’re all—” He takes a deep breath. “I didn’t know any other turned wolves, before.”

“So you just bit people, then?” Stiles says. “Hoped it would turn out okay? No worries about Russian Teeth Roulette?”

“I knew it could go wrong,” Derek says sharply. “You wish Scott hadn’t bitten you?”

Whatever is going to come out of his mouth is a lie, so Stiles just shakes his head and focuses on the wind brushing his cheeks, ruffling his hair. He doesn't try to get back up on the branch or drop down to his feet. Up here, suspended, he's neither trying nor failing; the only thing he's working against is gravity.

—

His seventh full moon, Stiles runs away.

He doesn't plan it—that would probably have involved lying, revealing himself through innumerable unchecked tells. Stiles doesn't let himself think about it until he's writing the usual note for his dad. _Be back tomorrow night, I'll be fine._ He texts Scott, _I'm okay_ , and turns off his phone.

Taking the Jeep would leave a trail, so he jogs into town and catches the bus that runs on the hour between Beacon Hills and Beacon Estates, the unincorporated village where Lydia and all the rich kids at school live. He gets off there and heads away from the preserve, into the woods that run along a creek towards the state historic park. This is unfamiliar ground, but there's no supernatural presence here as far as Stiles knows, and he'll be much harder for the pack to track, if they try. Hopefully, they won't.

The walk from the road to the park is five miles, long enough the soft rushing of the creek, the birds overhead, and the crickets chirping in the grass to grow familiar. Stiles hasn't shifted, not yet. Overhead, the sky is just beginning to gleam orange with the setting sun, not yet melting into purple dusk. He glimpses deer in the trees, slender and skittish, darting ahead alongside; they're only human-shy, not sensing the wolf that Stiles holds inside. The ground of the preserve is charged with the power of the nemeton, heavy with misery and unnatural death, but the earth here is nothing like that. The gravel and silt of the riverbed are inert. The air is clear.

At moonrise, Stiles is lying on his back in a clearing, dozing, barely alert. The shift rolls over him like a wave, lapping over his body as gentle as the current he followed here. There's nothing to resist. What can Stiles do? Topple a tree, maybe, if the roots are rotten; sink his teeth into a rabbit or a fawn, the same as humans do, minus the oven. He can't hurt anyone. There are plenty of predators in the park already, keeping the deer in check; they're a vital part of the ecosystem. There are no monsters here.

—

Stiles runs until dawn, gets fur and feathers in his teeth. He's nearly back to the clearing when Scott's howl splits the air, piercing as a fang. Clumsy again, Stiles trips over his own feet. Scott finds him with his palms deep in the dirt. "What the fuck were you thinking?" Scott yells, fisting his hand in the tatters of Stiles's shirt. "Just taking off like that—after—we ran the whole preserve looking for you, I've been driving around for the last hour with Lydia—"

"Lydia can find me anywhere, huh?" Stiles can feel his wolf curling back up inside him, tensed, ready to spring. "That's nice."

Scott roars and Stiles's body trembles, just shakes and shakes; he lowers his head in submission, beta to alpha. " _You don't know what you put us through_ ," Scott says—and then he lets go, steps back, the debris of the forest floor crunching beneath his feet. When Stiles dares to glance up again, Scott's arms are crossed, his shoulders hunched.

"I'm sorry," Stiles says.

"I don't know what to do," Scott says. "Like—I'm really bad at this. There's nobody I can ask. Derek just gives me books to read, and he was worse, you know?"

Stiles sits back on his heels, rubbing his palms against his thighs. "Are you kidding me? You're a true alpha. You are _the actual best alpha_. You're great. I'm the one who's fucked up. We're, like, the alpha and omega of werewolves."

"You're not an omega." Scott looks miserable. "You're my beta. My brother."

Stiles swallows, says, "You can't just say I'm your brother."

"You're my pack," Scott says. He comes closer, places his hand on Stiles's neck where it curves into his shoulder, and Stiles dips his head again. Something in him settles.

—

Lydia punches him. "You're such a dick," she says while Stiles stands there, holding his nose and waiting for the bleeding to stop. "Do you ever think about anyone but yourself? Ever?"

"I didn't know you'd—I'm _sorry_ ," Stiles bleats against his hand.

Scott hovers. Lydia ignores him. "I don't want an apology, I want an answer."

Blood trickles over Stiles's dirt-smeared palm and down the inside of his wrist before it starts to drip onto his jeans. "You're all better off without me, anyway. You're just—better."

"Yeah, maybe." Lydia folds her arms, tucking her hands behind her elbows like she's trying to resist the temptation to punch him again. "We still care about you. Not only when you're _useful_."

A year ago, Lydia admitting that she cared about him would have been the best moment of Stiles's life. Now it feels like a death sentence. His gut roils with guilt and shame—same old, same old. Stiles says, "Stop it."

Lydia sneers. "No."

"Um," Scott says; Lydia and Stiles both glare at him until he frowns back. "I just—is this helpful, guys?"

"I can't," Lydia says, looking back to Stiles. "Did you forget that? I still—I hear you, okay. I can hear when you sneeze, when you cough, when you—" She pauses delicately.

"Are you listening to me jerk off?" Stiles says. "Seriously?"

"Yet I'm not the one running away from home because _my_ life is out of control," she snaps.

They're quite for a moment. Stiles's nose has stopped bleeding; the blood on his hand is still wet. "I'm sorry," he says again. "I don't know what to do."

Lydia sighs. She rummages through the purse she has tucked under her arm and pulls out a pack of wet wipes, holds it out to him. "Clean up your face."

—

"I ran away once," Derek says. He's up in Scott's tree with Stiles this time, and it's dawn. Supposedly, they're trying to identify birds. "I went all the way to Yosemite and stayed there for a few weeks."

A yard over, there's a woodpecker drilling into a tree; Stiles feels like the woodpecker's drilling into his head. "How did that work for you?"

Derek shrugs; leaves rustle. "When you're grieving, it's tempting. Some of us go omega, like Malia, stay shifted out in the woods for—as long as it takes. But my alpha came for me."

"Laura?" Stiles says.

Derek shakes his head. "My mom."

From this height, Stiles can see over the other houses in Scott's neighborhood all the way out to the main road to the east, to the hills that rise up into the preserve. His own home is to the west, obscured by the trees in the neighbor's yard and the way the land dips toward the river. The hospital is due north, the high school half a mile south, and beyond that lies Beacon Estates and the state park, which Stiles has to twist around to see. His entire life is mapped out on the ground beneath him, a thousand daily passages woven together like tapestry through a dozen square miles. Up here, it seems so small.

—

That week, Stiles starts dreaming about deer. In his dreams, he's running alongside the creek, racing them—not with superhuman speed, just the loping stride that took him through last year's cross-country meets. The deer keep up with him, usually outpace him from what he can see through the trees and the scrub at the river's edge. Though he's running, there's no sense of urgency. He goes on and on without tiring, straight until morning.

There's a pop quiz on ecological niches in Environmental Science on Friday— _compare/contrast fundamental and realized niches, define "adaptive zone."_ The room goes quiet to human ears; for Stiles it's all scratching pencils on ruled paper, Greenberg coughing in the front row, someone shifting in a squeaky chair in the back. Stiles breathes in deeply and closes his eyes for a moment.

In class and on paper, all this seems so simple, like a bottle ecosystem, a closed unit. Reality is messy—it's Laura going into the earth, her progression from predator to prey to decomposing matter; it's Scott on the ground with Allison in his arms and blood on his mouth. Stiles took the bite in his own bed, went from febrile shivers to pain to abrupt awareness between sweat-soaked sheets, as safe as could be. Maybe that's where everything went wrong. He didn't think the bite was going to bring a kind of death with it, that it would leave him fumbling for a new niche to fill.

Stiles finishes the quiz before the teacher calls time and stares out the window for a few minutes. He gets it. He—yeah. This is it.

—

Back behind the razed ruin of the Hale house, Stiles strips to the skin, throws his clothes haphazard into a pile on top of each other. He's been going about this wrong the whole time—they all have, thinking that Stiles can be housebroken, that discipline will fix him and turn him back into the Stiles that used to be. Stiles isn't human anymore, and he isn't a domesticated animal. He's the top of a whole new food chain and king of a whole new world. Love can't tether him, duty has no hold on him, and there's no metaphysical awakening on the horizon. He can't anchor himself with his heart or his head.

Barefoot, the ground of the preserve is new beneath his feet. Stiles roars with joy, feeling it, learning it in his shifted body, feeling the crisp air on his skin. He splashes into a stream and spears a fish on his claws, guts it and eats it right there on the shore, feet dangling in the water. The trees tower above him, trunks tall and broad. He climbs one easily, though the cover is so dense he can't see much beyond the leaves around him when he gets to the top. On the leap down, he catches himself on a low branch and swings into an graceful dismount. The preserve thrums around him.

The untouched forest is no utopia— it's survival of the fittest out here, swift and violent death running counterpoint to the bud of new life. Forest fires clear out the brush and make way for new growth; predators complement prey. Stiles has read his textbook over so many times he can recite some sections by memory. The magic of the preserve is nothing more than the rhythm of the natural world amplified: death, life, death again, absorbed into the ground with castoff foliage. Druid mystery is wolf fact, Stiles's spark manifest in this new body. He runs through the woods on all fours, digging his toes into the loamy earth, improbably whole and alive.


	2. Chapter 2

Derek is waiting for him back at the start, sitting on a tree stump with a book in his hands. He looks up when Stiles comes out of the forest, naked and filthy, human again. Stiles doesn't bother to cover himself. When he gets to his pile of discarded clothes, he wipes off as best he can with his t-shirt before he pulls on his jeans and his plaid overshirt. "Are you on babysitter duty?" Stiles says.

"Scott said you skipped your last two classes," Derek says. "He thought you might be out here."

Stiles scrubs at his fingernails with the t-shirt. "You're out of a job now. I've attained wolfy nirvana."

There's a pause. "What is it?"

"Some circle of life bullshit." It sounds stupid when Stiles says it aloud. "Hopefully I'll stop breaking the fridge now."

"I didn't know about the fridge," Derek says.

Stiles shrugs. "Well, now you do." There's so much less noise in his head—he can tune out the birds, the semi rumbling down the main road, the squirrels chittering in the trees. "Does this mean I get my car keys back now? Can I drive your car?"

"Maybe you should rinse off first," Derek says.

Stiles tips back his head and howls.

—

Scott texts _????_ , then approximately 900 rocket emojis and a few stars.

Stiles texts back a rocket emoji of his own before he pockets his phone. He closes his eyes, listening to the way the car purrs as Derek shifts gears, soaking up the mingled scents of freshly-shampooed carpets, leather polish, and woodland dirt. He feels calm and wired all at once, like the first day he started on stimulants. Centered. Awake.

—

At home, Stiles jerks off in the shower for the first time in months and comes so hard he almost passes out. He slides down the wall of the shower into the tub and takes one gulping breath after another while hot water pelts down on him and the air steams. This is real. He can't quite believe it, after all this time, that he might get through this, that everything might be okay. He's spent so much time trying to accept that there's no light at the end of the tunnel that he can't quite imagine what happens next.

He dresses quickly, carelessly, without worrying about straining the shoulders of his shirt or tearing the button off his cords. Everything flows, easy, seamless. When he goes downstairs, Derek looks up at Stiles from his perch on the couch, and, _oh_. Stiles is seeing Derek again for the first time, like that day they met out in the woods, back when they were private property. Derek is wearing jeans and a thick plaid sweater that hangs over his sturdy frame like a poncho, shoulders dropping off his shoulders before they blouse into sleeves. There's cat hair all over it.

"How did you get a cat?" Stiles says. "Did she just show up on your doorstep one day with matted fur and no sense of self-preservation?"

Derek shakes his head. "Older cats have a harder time getting adopted. Scott—"

Scott gave Derek a cat. Scott gave Derek _Stiles_. Scott can't make Derek join his pack, but he's still— "Jesus," Stiles groans. He rubs his hand over his face. Everything's so obvious now, the world gleaming with unanticipated clarity. "I need a burger."

—

Everyone crowds into the biggest booth in the restaurant, Scott and Lydia sandwiching Stiles between them, Kira next to Derek, Allison and Isaac squeezing in at the ends. "I feel like we should have a party with streamers," Kira says. "Kazoos. A pinata."

"Perfect for the prodigal child," Lydia says sharply. "Champagne all around."

Allison says, "Or jello shots."

Stiles orders a huge bacon cheeseburger that comes with a massive steak knife jabbed through it like a deadly toothpick. He eats the entire thing while Lydia and Allison debate the relevance of _Sex and the City_ and Carl Sagan to the hypothetical drink menu. Kira shares her fries; Scott throws his arm over Stiles's shoulder and keeps bumping their ankles together, grounding, reassuring. Isaac is building a log cabin out of sugar packets while he talks to Derek about his class schedule for the fall. When Stiles catches Allison's eye, she smiles.

They're all leaning into each other, unconsciously marking each other, their mingled scents joyful. Stiles has spent so many months buried under fear, too hopeless to hope, that it's a shock to find that they haven't tired of him. He's missed them settling into each other, the way Allison and Kira air-five over Scott's head and Isaac's subtle glances toward Stiles, trying to gauge his welcome. Stiles kicks him under the table, or tries to—Derek gives him a sharp, assessing look before turning back to Isaac. Whatever. Stiles has never been graceful. There's only so much werewolf reflexes can do.

"I want streamers," he says loudly. "Streamers and hot dogs and beer."

" _Hot dogs_ ," Lydia says at the same time as Scott says, " _Beer_."

Stiles grins. "Oscar Meyer and Natty Light. It's on."

"If you're doing anything illegal recreationally, I don't want to know about it," Derek says grimly to his milkshake. Stiles kicks him under the table again. This time it's on purpose.

—

Stiles spends most of the party floating in Lydia's pool on a fancy chaise with drink holders and headrests. "Hey, go team," Stiles says when Allison floats past on her own chaise. "We survived."

Allison dips an arm into the water and paddles until she drifts into can-clinking distance. "Cheers to us. To Scott."

Scott's sitting on the edge of the pool with his feet dangling in the pool. Kira's next to him in the water, her arms folded on the tile, head tilted against Scott's knee. "You guys did everything," Scott says, face serious. "You're—you. I just helped."

"I know, dude," Stiles says. The beer is terrible, wheaty, piss-flavored water with no buzz to dull the taste after the first can. He drinks anyway. This was what he always used to want—friends, a social life, parties with shitty beer instead of hallucinogenic punch—and even if he had to die twice to get it, it's worth it.

"Not to break up this touching moment, but I have more hot dogs," Isaac says. "And bratwurst."

The remaining members of the party are clustered around the grill. Derek looks like he's trying not to breathe in the scent of charring meat, so kind of constipated, but he refuses to anyone else take charge. "You'll overcook it," he said earlier, snatching the meat from Stiles. "Let me. Please."

"The hot dogs are already cooked," Stiles pointed out.

Lydia is hovering over Derek's shoulder now, cosmo in hand, critiquing his grilling methods and reminding him to rotate the vegetable skewers. Whatever, she's their hostess, she's Lydia—she's allowed to break the rules. Her cheeks are flushed and her lipstick is smeared: Allison pulled her into the pool earlier and they made out for like five minutes on the pool chaise, knocked Allison's second beer into the water. Stiles closed his eyes and paddled around, soaking up the fading sunlight, the familiar scents of chlorine, Kira's suntan lotion, cooking meat. Like that, he could almost pretend to be human.

"Someone get me another beer," Scott says. Isaac tosses one over from the cooler and Stiles catches it mid-air, slides out of his chaise to swim to the shallow end. He pops the tab with a claw before he hands it over. Kira grins as Scott says, "My knight in shining armor."

Stiles wades toward the stairs. "You want some water, too?"

"I have enough, dude." Scott splashes his feet to illustrate his point. "But—sure, yeah, okay."

—

By the end of the night, almost everyone is sacked out in Lydia's living room, piled onto two huge couches and blissfully snoring. Stiles feels some weird obligation as guest of honor, so he grabs a garbage bag and starts collecting abandoned cans and paper plates and used napkins. When he ventures into the kitchen, Derek is there loading the dishwasher, pausing to hand-wash Lydia's cocktail glass and put it in the drying rack. Stiles says, "Aww, you didn't have to."

Derek shrugs. "It needed to be done."

"You didn't have to werewolf Yoda me, either," Stiles says. "I know that you feel like you owe Scott for some reason, but—you didn't have to."

"I didn't do it for Scott." Derek rinses his hands, dries them on the floral dish rag hanging next to the sink. "I did it for you."

Stiles folds his arms, can't make himself look up to meet Derek's eyes. He feels—small, all of the sudden. "Oh."

"You think I don't think about you?" Derek says softly. "I wanted you for my pack. If I could have, when you got sick—I would have turned you."

"Like you turned Erica and Boyd?" Stiles says. "Isaac?"

Derek makes a horrible, wrenching sound, fingers digging into Lydia's counter. "They needed me then," he says after a moment. "You didn't."

Stiles is losing his hold, everything crowding in on him again: the bright false lemon of Lydia's dish soap and the funk of the trash bag in his hand, his pack's soft heartbeats in the other room and Derek's here, louder, rougher, close. He focuses on Derek's breathing, in-out, in-out, until his own steadies. He can't imagine what it would have been like, having Derek as his alpha—probably, a disaster. Now, they're finally on the same footing. Occupying the same niche.

—

Stiles waits for Lydia by her locker after school, fidgeting until she shows up, for once without Allison in tow. "Do you have to do this at my house?" he says. "I mean—Deaton—"

"I work better when you're around," Lydia says grudgingly.

"You mean, I clean up after you," Stiles says.

Lydia starts dialing the combination on her locker. "That, too."

Mountain ash circles were as far as Stiles got in the applied magic department, but the more Lydia practices, the more powerful she gets. With the right words, she can burn the pack's locations into a map; if she plucks a string between focus objects, she can hear voices in the echoes. "This is bad science," she says today as she and Stiles get down on their yoga mats to meditate. "I object to it."

"Yeah, whatever," Stiles says. "Get your occlumency on."

Lydia rolls her eyes. "Think of something nice."

They hum together, focusing on the same pitch, closing their eyes. All Stiles can think of is one of the does he saw in the park—dappled coat, round eyes, broad ears, her movement through the trees along the river the same as in his dreams. He inhales and Lydia exhales; he exhales and Lydia inhales. The world drops away.

"Your anchor is _Bambi_ ," Lydia says a while later.

Stiles yawns. "More _Lion King_."

"There's worse, I guess," she says.

—

"I'm very proud of you, Stiles," Dad says. "But maybe we should stick with the plan of you not using kitchen appliances unless you're paying full attention."

"That's fair," Stiles says from beneath the microwave. It's probably uninjured, and he'll recover.

Instead of the ruined frozen lasagna, they eat Tuna Helper and salad from a bag for dinner, just like old times. Dad keeps looking up and smiling at him, just a little tick up at the corner of his mouth that Stiles can't help but return. There's a warm tickle of affection in his chest. Around a mouthful of iceberg lettuce, he says, "Let's go to Great America next month. You never want to go to Great America."

Dad sighs. "How about fishing? You can commune with nature, there are no vomiting children on rollercoasters, you won't lecture me on buying the cotton candy."

"It's for your own good," Stiles says. "Come on, Scott can't just go around biting everybody."

As soon as Stiles says it, he wants to crawl under the table, but Dad just shakes his head. He looks a little sad around the eyes. "We'll see how the microwave is doing at the end of the month."

—

Final exams loom, descend upon them, and pass, and then they're free for the summer. Stiles scrapes by with Bs, which is more than he expected. He celebrates by going out for a run through the preserve and skinny-dipping in the stream until the sun dips below the horizon and the temperature drops. Shivering, he walks back to his car. Derek is waiting for him.

"Couldn't leave a note?" Stiles says.

"Just wanted to check on you," Derek says stiffly. "I haven't seen you in a while."

It's true. They met once or twice a week for months, but they've barely seen each other since the pool party at Lydia's. Stiles has been doing his homework, jogging around the neighborhood, playing video games at Scott's and hanging around the station with his dad; it's not like there are a lot of opportunities for the two of them to run into each other. "Yeah." Stiles folds his arms across his chest. His shirt is soaked, skin clammy, goosebumps on his arms. "Where have you been, anyway?"

Instead of answering, Derek frowns and tugs his sweater over his head. It's thick, chunky wool, something Stiles has seen him wear before. He holds it out to Stiles. "You're cold."

Stiles hesitates for a moment before he strips his wet shirt off. The sweater is a little scratchy, but soft and dry. It smells like Derek, which makes Stiles's gut feel tight and warm. "Thanks," he says. "I missed you, dude. Scott's having a movie night on Thursday—did anyone text you?"

"No," Derek says.

"Ah," Stiles says. "Well, you should come."

The words hang between them for a long moment.. Stiles doesn't know how to make things comfortable, companionable, like they were when he sucked at werewolfing and Derek sucked at teaching. Derek prefers to communicate in tortured facial expressions, big gestures, and hand-me-down clothing—he gave Kira a leather jacket 20 minutes after they met—and Stiles's vocabulary is, like, actual vocabulary. He steps forward and touches Derek's arm, waits for Derek to flinch away. He doesn't.

"Okay," Derek says. "I'll—Thursday."

—

On Tuesday, Stiles runs into Derek in the chip aisle at the grocery store. Stiles is juggling five kinds of Doritos because he mistakenly thought he could stop at three, wouldn't need a basket; Derek has an oversize bag of tortilla chips and a jar of medium salsa. They exchange awkward bro nods as they pass each other around the section where the chips transition through Pringles into Chex Mix and nuts. Stiles is late for game night with Scott, and his focus is on whether he can successfully maneuver a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew: Code Red into the crook of his arm without dropping anything. As it turns out, he can.

The bite is a gift.

At movie night, Isaac and Kira sprawl on the floor with Scott between them and the former Team Human cram onto the couch. Derek turns up with a few bags of microwave popcorn before they start. When he looks around the room tentatively, Lydia scoots back onto Allison's lap and Stiles pats the open space next to him. "Here," he says. "This is the party couch."

"Please, this is the party floor," Kira says as she scrolls through the apps on the XBox to Netflix. She doesn't protest when Derek heads toward the couch, though, just lifts her feet so he can pass behind her. He eases himself down next to Stiles, like he's the one most likely to cause damage to the furniture.

"We are not watching _Godzilla_ again," Lydia says. "Or _Toy Story 3_."

"I love _Toy Story 3_ ," Scott says, trying to butt his foot against Lydia's dangling toes and missing.

Allison kicks his foot away, not too hard. "It makes everyone cry."

"It made me cry," Stiles says to Derek. They're pressed together tight, hip to hip, which is a little like leaning into an fuzzy radiator. Today's sweater is thin, dark blue, with a hole working its way open at the shoulder seam. Stiles wants topress his finger against the sliver of white undershirt he can see beneath. "Aren't you hot?"

Derek raises an eyebrow.

"The air conditioning is broken," Stiles says. "It's June."

Isaac leans back against the couch. "We should watch _Mean Girls_."

Kira scrolls past Wildlife Documentaries to Teen Comedies. "Why is _The Craft_ in this category?"

Stiles has run hot ever since his werewolfication, giving him some sympathy for Scott's newfound tendency to ditch shirts, and Derek's sweater is making his arm itch. "Seriously, what's with the sweaters?"

"I vote for _The Craft_ ," Allison says.

They watch _The Craft_. Stiles has sweat trickling between his shoulder blades by the end, his back sticking to the couch's faux leather. Everyone else seems comfortable, oblivious; Lydia has her face tucked against Allison's shoulder, dozing through Nancy's breakdown, and Scott is out, too, head resting on his folded arms. Derek is staring straight forward at the screen like he's riveted by the action, but his face is flat, expressionless—he's not reacting. Stiles can't stop glancing at him. Derek's heartbeat thrums in Stiles's ears; every flutter of movement sends a tremor through Stiles like an earthquake. This is the kind of focus Derek wanted him to learn, training him day after day, but he didn't teach Stiles how to stop.

Lydia tugs at Stiles's sleeve when the credits roll, pulls him back into the world. "I can hear you," she says, shaping her words with a bare suggestion of breath, so softly that they're nearly private between them. "I hear your heart."

Next to Stiles, Derek stirs; Stiles looks back, can't help it, and Derek's gaze is wide open, vulnerable, slicing into the weight in Stiles's chest like a knife. "I gotta—" Stiles swallows. He wants to—he doesn't know what he wants, but he's not brave enough right now. "Let me up, okay? I'll be back in a sec."

At their feet, Isaac says, "So, _Mean Girls_? It's my turn now."

—

Stiles goes up to Scott's room and lies down on his bed. Scott's scent is heady, soothing, alpha; Stiles's whole body goes limp with relief when he presses his face into Scott's pillow. He doesn't notice that Lydia's followed him until she's closing the door behind her.

"I can't turn it _off_ ," she says. Lydia's still sleepy, and the words trip out of her mouth lazily, not quite slurred. "Do you understand now? There's not even a reason, I don't have some _thing_ for you, like you—"

"Don't say it," Stiles says, because Lydia can hear it, but he's not ready to. That's when it comes to him, all of it—the morning she woke up next to him, how she followed him into the white dreamworld, heard him in the resonance of his strings. How her magic sings more sweetly in his presence. She doesn't want to hear this, either. He sits up, turns so he can look her in the eye. "It's because you drowned me. I'm your first death. I'm your anchor."

Lydia backs up against the doorway, puts her hands over her mouth.

"Anchors can change." Stiles wants to go to her, hold her, comfort her. He stays where he is. "We can—we can fix it, okay? It'll get better."

"That's rich, coming from you," she says after a long moment, dropping her hands.

Stiles swallows. "It's not even about me, right? I could have been—anybody, anybody could have—"

"I could have drowned Allison," Lydia says. "I didn't get to choose. I didn't _know_."

"Would that make it better?" Stiles says. "If it was her?"

Lydia shakes her head slowly. "I—no. No."

When Stiles holds out his hands, Lydia steps forward to take what's offered, grips them tightly. For now, the two of them are stronger together; as long as they're pack, though, they always will be. "You can do this," he says. "You're not on your own."

—

Lying in Scott's bed, Stiles listens to everyone leave: first Allison and Lydia, then Kira, then Derek. Scott locks up behind them and comes upstairs, says, "Move over." They cram in together like they have dozens of times since they were kids, back when Scott's bed was more than big enough for them both.

"I didn't know this was going to be so hard," Scott says after a while. He's spooned up behind Stiles, in primo position to spend the night drooling on Stiles's shoulder. "For you. For everybody."

"Peter's the one who bit Lydia," Stiles says. He hasn't thought about Peter in a while, or the bite he refused. "That's not your fault."

"I bit _you_ ," Scott says.

Stiles shrugs. "You made me a werewolf, you didn't turn me into an asshole."

"Pre-existing condition," Scott agrees. "No werewolf coverage."

They fall asleep in between one breath and the next, Scott huffing gently against Stiles's neck, Stiles's hands tucked beneath his head so his arms don't fall off the bed. As predicted, Scott drools.

—

In the morning, Stiles finds Isaac in the kitchen, eating the last of the store-brand Captain Crunch. "Wow, dick move," Stiles says, snatching the Froot Loops off the top of the fridge before Isaac can lay waste to them. "You use all the milk, too?"

Isaac narrows his eyes over his spoonful of cereal. "I live here, Stiles. It's my house."

"You don't even like Captain Crunch," Stiles says.

"Boys, play nice," Melissa says in the other room, not bothering to raise her voice. Upstairs, Scott rolls over in bed and mumbles, "Sharing is caring."

—

The next day, Stiles is driving through Beacon Estates to the custard stand beyond when he gets rerouted by construction. He turns off the main road onto the road that curves around the west half of town, following the orange detour arrow, and he's driving past the Ladies Village Improvement Society when he sees a familiar car in the parking lot. He doesn't think twice before turning around and beelining for the open space next to it. As soon as he gets out of the Jeep, Stiles can smell Derek—his scent is fresh, but layered, like he comes here a lot. To the _Ladies Village Improvement Society_ , in _Beacon Estates_ , what the _fuck_.

Stiles follows Derek's trail around the side of the building, down a half-flight of stairs, and to a faded green door with a freshly-painted sign: THRIFT SHOP. Stiles turns the brass knob, pushes, and the door swings in on quiet hinges.

"Can I help you?" Derek says from the counter without looking up.

"Uh," Stiles says as the door swings shut behind him. "You tell me?"

As a werewolf, Stiles is learning a lot of new things—it's possible to smell embarrassed, for one. Derek's cheeks pink and he squares his shoulders. "I'm off at six, if you need something. Or were you—"

"Is this a thing?" Stiles gestures around the store, at the display of costume jewelry up front, the shelves of shoes in the back, the rack of—sweaters. Oh. Okay. "Actually, this explains a lot."

"Really," Derek says.

The sweaters are sorted by size, then color—this would be Lydia's kind of place if everything were twenty years older and cost four times as much. Stiles can smell the ones that Derek's handled, the ones that he's lingered over, a selection that's kind of terrifying. The best has white-on-black zebra print spiraling up the arms and a huge zebra head rearing on the front. “You need to add this to your collection.” Stiles holds it up. “It’s fierce. It suits you.”

Derek raises an eyebrow. “That's $7.00 plus tax."

“Fine," Stiles says. He drops the sweater on the counter, hanger and all. "Ring me up, baby.” He leans forward and braces himself on the counter with his palms.

Derek stares at him for a long moment. Finally, he says, “$7.49.”

Stiles pulls a ten out of his wallet. “Put it on.”

The cash register pings, the drawer springs open. Stiles's heartbeat throbs in his ears, too loud, as Derek counts out his change. Derek stands up to pull the sweater on; he wriggles his way into the too-wide, too-short sleeves like he's performing a striptease in reverse, swims into the stretched collar, showing his belly. Literally. The sweater’s plus-size, but cut for someone with a much shorter torso. On Derek, it’s practically a crop top.

“Wow.” Stiles says. He covers his mouth with his hand. “Wow, I didn’t—”

“You were right,” Derek says, straightening. “It’s fierce.”

—

"So," Stiles says, because he's struggling here. "Scott is protecting Beacon Hills, and you're… guarding it. By volunteering. And mentoring struggling werewolf children, because your criminal record would keep you out of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Northern California."

"My grandmother was part of the Ladies Village Improvement Society," Derek says before he licks a stripe of melted chocolate custard off his wrist.

They're both down to t-shirts now, leaning against the back of Stiles's Jeep beneath the flickering neon of the ROBOS FROZEN CUSTARD sign. Stiles used to come here with his mom. There are kids that age here now, tagging behind parents or older siblings, kicking a soccer ball around in the field across the street. They make him feel old, which is probably how Derek feels all the time.

Stiles licks a wide stripe up the side of his cone. Robos has just two options, chocolate and vanilla—the vanilla tastes like sweet cream, the chocolate like a cold Hershey bar. He always gets them swirled together, likes watching the person at the counter twist the cone beneath the custard machine. This is the first time that he's been back here since the bite. He swallows, says, "Did your grandma bring you here?"

Derek shakes his head. "Dad's mom. She was more the ice cream parlor type."

"Baskin Robbins?" Stiles says.

"No," Derek says. "She liked places with glassware."

Stiles has eaten ice cream out of a glass dish, but it was a Pyrex measuring cup that Scott's mom left in the dish strainer. "Yeah… okay."

"My dad loved Robos, though," Derek says. "Cora always nagged him to bring us here."

Stiles takes a huge bite of his custard so he doesn't say anything terrible. It's so cold he can feel his toes tingle, but at least werewolves don't get brain freeze. He works the custard around in his mouth, waiting for it to melt into eggy cream on his tongue before he swallows. Derek doesn't seem to notice that they've fallen into an awkward silence. He's licking at his own cone as daintily as Lydia would, which is both hilarious and weirdly charming. Stiles is charmed. That's a thing that's happening.

"Derek, you don't have to do all this stuff," he says. "With the thrift store, and me, and everything."

Derek rolls his eyes. "You're not a charity. I helped you because I wanted to."

"I know," Stiles says. "You want to make out?"

There's custard caught in Derek's artfully manicured stubble and his eyes are wide with surprise—like he didn't expect this, like he didn't think— "You don't owe me anything," Derek says.

Stiles leans into Derek's space, just a little. "I want to kiss you because I _want_ to."

Derek drops his custard cone.

They both stare at the cone for a long moment, face-down on the ground, and then Derek laughs. He's still laughing when Stiles yanks him forward, and then they're kissing, custard lost to the dirt. Their lips don't meet quite right—Stiles starts out with his at the chocolate-sweet corner of Derek's mouth—but they get lined up after a moment, and then it's all systems go, Stiles's fingers rucking up Derek's shirt at the small of his back, Derek's hand in Stiles's back pocket. Stiles didn't know he wanted this, that he wanted anything as badly as a Robos swirl that tasted the same as when he came here with his mom, but he lets go of his cone so he can pull Derek closer, because he knows now. He knows.

—

"Girls' night in." Lydia shoos them out of the house, leaving Melissa and Kira with the nail polish in the living room. "Sorry, baby," she says to Allison. "I'll see you—"

Allison darts in to kiss Lydia's cheek before Lydia can slam the door shut. "In the morning."

Lydia shoots Stiles one last look over Allison's shoulder. "In the morning."

Scott is already sliding behind the wheel of the Jeep when Stiles turns around, which— "It's my car," Stiles says, "You're the alpha, you get _shotgun_." He ends up having to shove Scott back over to his side while Allison and Isaac climb into the back, and it's a mess of arms and legs, everyone amped up, overexcited.

It's the full moon, and for the first time, Stiles is going to run with his pack.

The sun is setting when they get to the entry of the preserve, and it's nearly moonrise by the time they spill out of the car. Scott and Isaac tumble over each other, end up tussling in the grass half-shifted; Allison lets out her claws as she watches. "Still wish you'd had meningitis?" she says to Stiles.

Stiles shrugs. "Yeah," he says. "But this is okay. It works for me."

Somewhere in the woods ahead, Derek howls; farther off, there's answering call from a coyote. Scott shoves Isaac off and gets to his feet, yanks his shirt over his head. "Come on, guys, betas, yeah!" he says. "Let's go!"

Stiles kicks off his shoes, digs his heels into the dirt. His claws come first, then his teeth, last the muttonchops and unibrow. The earth is rich and deep beneath him, and above, the moon hangs bright and high.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [ladyofthelog](http://ladyofthelog.tumblr.com) on tumblr.


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